The Sacred Mystery
Attempting to Understand the Holy Trinity
Sherman Kuek, SFO
Published in Catholic Asian News
(February 2009 Issue)
The word “Trinity”, like a number of other words commonly employed by the Christian community, cannot be found in Sacred Scripture. However, the dogma itself was formulated as intellectual but devout minds studied and discovered it in Scripture. All throughout the centuries, the followers of Jesus Christ have never flinched from the use of this term even when it caused them to become objects of ridicule and scathing criticism by wider society.
To this day, the dogma on the Trinity remains a distinctively Christian doctrine. And still, it often seems like a self-contradicting doctrine to many. How do we intellectually justify that “God is one, and yet there are three who are God”? The seeming “mathematical dilemma” posed by this dogma of the Church may never have a terminal solution to it, especially if it continues being examined from a numerical perspective. But as we explore Sacred Scripture, it is evident how God reveals Himself to be one God and yet three persons.
Sacred Scripture presents three assertions about the Trinitarian nature of God: firstly, that God is one; secondly, that three persons are God; and thirdly, that the three persons exist in a state of perfect unity.
Lest anyone should think that Christians worship three gods, we find that Scripture defends the oneness of God. The adamant proclamation in Deuteronomy 6:4-6 of the Old Testament (also known to the Jews as the Shema) reads as follows: “Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one, the only Yahweh. You must love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let the words I enjoin on you today stay in your heart”.
This resolute proclamation from Deuteronomy finds agreement in the New Testament as well. James 2:19 says to his readers, “You believe in the one God - that is creditable enough...” St Paul similarly instructs in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6, “...there is no God other than the One... for us there is only one God, the Father from whom all things come and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things come and through whom we exist”. Likewise, in 1 Timothy 2:5-6, we are told, “For there is only one God...”
Evidently, monotheism (i.e., the belief in the oneness of God) is deeply implanted in the Christian faith, although we are frequently being misunderstood by some people of other religions.
But perhaps this misconception on the part of our other neighbours stems from the fact that Scripture somehow refers to more than just God the Father, and describes two other persons through implicit or explicit reference, implying that they are somehow part of the “Godhead”.
For instance, in the gospels of Matthew (26:63-65) John (19:7), Jesus came as close as He ever did to affirming His own deity. If He truly did not regard himself as God, this would have been a splendid opportunity to correct a mistaken impression, but He did not do so. Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 and 6:19-20, St Paul, in asserting that our bodies are the temple of God, seems to use the terms “Holy Spirit” and “God” interchangeably.
As if the above descriptions are not already baffling enough, the Trinitarian formulation does not end here! Scripture also describes a kind of a relationship between the three persons, as if they exist in some inexplicable state of profound unity.
This can be seen in the baptismal formula given by Jesus to the Apostles in Matthew 28:19: “Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” This threefold formula is also used by St Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”.
Scripture seems to be revealing that all three - Father, Son and HS are equally and fully divine, that none of them is “more God” than the other two. They have always been three persons and there has never been any alteration in the nature of the triune God.
Thus, in our own feeble and utterly limited way, we can conclude that the being of God is so complex that any attempt to describe him must defy grammatical conventions - One are three, and three is God. Beyond that, no other attempts to explicate this dogma can ever adequately reflect who the Trinitarian God is.
Even St Augustine, one of the most creative minds in the history of Christian theology, who spent sixteen years of his life trying to figure out the doctrine of the trinity in his fifteen-volume dissertation De Trinitate, concludes that it is simply impossible to have a perfect understanding of the Trinity.
Admittedly, the Trinity is a doctrine that is hard to defend. It is a doctrine that has at times made the Church a laughing stock of the religious world because it defies a very fundamental law of the human intellect, i.e. the law of logic.
Without the doctrine of the Trinity, it would have been much easier for many intellects to have embraced the Christians faith. And yet, despite many accusations and sustained mockery, the Church refuses to budge from this doctrine. Rather, we even persist in our efforts to defend this dogma. Early Church Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine sought to defend the Trinitarian teaching with all their might.
Irenaeus, in defending the dogma, states:
For the Church, although dispersed throughout the whole world even to the ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and from their disciples the faith in one God, the Father Almighty ...and in one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit. (Against Heresies, 1:10:1)
His defence finds concurrence in Tertullian’s statement on the faith of the Church:
We do indeed believe that there is only one God, but we believe that under this dispensation, or, as we say, oikonomia, there is also a Son of this one only God, His Word, who proceeded from Him and through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made. . . . We believe He was sent down by the Father, in accord with His own promise, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father and the Son, and in the Holy Spirit... This rule of faith has been present since the beginning of the gospel, before even the earlier heretics. (Against Praxeas, 2)
Why such adamant defence? It is because Holy Mother Church recognises that the doctrine of the Trinity is not humanly constructed or ingeniously crafted by the human intellect. It is a doctrine that is uniquely and divinely revealed by God, through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, and particularly through the sending of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit who works among us and lives in us today.
A Christian believer once replied the following to an atheist who challenged him regarding the necessity of such a dogma: “Try to explain it, and you may lose your mind; but try to deny it, and you will lose your soul”.
In the final analysis, the most realistic reason for our not being able to fully explain the Trinity is that He is nothing less than God. But He has revealed Himself enough for us to know that the God we worship is a Trinity. This is a precious truth that we should jealously guard until we meet the Trinity face to face.
And so, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, and with the Church on earth, we can pray as St Augustine has prayed:
O Lord our God, we believe in You, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. For the Truth would not say, “Go, baptise all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, unless You were a Trinity. Nor would You, O Lord God, bid us to be baptised in the name of Him who is not the Lord God. Nor would the divine voice have said, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God”, unless You were so a Trinity as to be one Lord God. (De Trinitate, 15:28)
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
